Outgoing Mphasis CEO Ganesh Ayyar said that automation will result in more job losses and urged the $150-billion Indian IT industry should take a more humane approach to solve the visa problem by investing more locally.
Talking to BusinessLine , Ayyar said the industry needs to see the issues relating to H1-B visas from a different perspective.
“In the past, the context was different but now the script has changed and the industry needs to acknowledge that,” he said. The context that Ayyar refers to has to do with Indian companies pitchforking engineers from India to the US in client sites and (in a lot of cases) not paying the required minimum wage law to those engineers.
All that is beginning to change with US President Donald Trump putting his foot down on and a huge possibility of changes in law with regard to technology-related work visas.
Ayyar strongly believes that every company has an obligation to invest in places where they get value from. “This investment need not be capital and can be even in aspects like training local talent,” he said.
All the major software exporters have faced a considerable amount of backlash in the recent past as the US economy continues to be sluggish, resulting in an inability to create jobs for laid off engineers, which has given rise to increasing protectionism in developed economies.
This layoffs are a combination of low skilled labour availability in other countries and rapid shifts in technology, according to industry watchers. Automation, more than any country is starting to take away jobs, said Ayyar, referring to politicians’ stance against specific countries taking away jobs from the US.
Industry watchers also believe that automation will impact the bottom and middle level employees massively. Gaurav Singh, co- founder of Chicago-based Parkar Consulting, pointed out that the future will be less hiring but bigger leaps in productivity.
India churns out the third-highest number of graduates in the world after China and the US, consisting of millions of engineers, is already seeing large swathes of them not unemployed.